alt Hacker NewsI think I can see where you're coming from - and it is true that there are cases of dogmatism as a defense for just sucking at UX - but I violently disagree here.
Good UX I believe doesn't mean that the implementation details are hidden, but conveyed in a way that is human-readable. You do not hide the machine from the man, but translate between them in a way that makes neither of them invisible.
This makes for better experiences, as reality gets bound by.. well.. reality. So you don't get these weird failure modes that live in the gap between the narrative (e.g. "everything just works") and reality (e.g. "networks are always black magic").
This is also important for the user, because by having _a_ mental model (even if it is very low-res), they gain the ability to diagnose issues themselves and not be completely helpless once the magic box breaks down. They might not know exactly what to do, but the direction is very clear.
Agency is important. A lot more important than convenience. And fake convenience through frontloading short-term rewards for long-term systemic instability.
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That's one of the things that surprised me (in a positive way) about Mac OS X when I first got to use it -- it actually does indeed do lots of things in an _understandable_ and genuinely simple way. It's also clear how much work went into making the system behave in this way, it certainly wasn't an accident.
In the era of web apps and Electronification of anything I believe most of this is sadly gone, but in the older Mac OS X models you could clearly understand and see the logic behind the software and I believe it worked well for non-technical people from what I observed.
> Good UX I believe doesn't mean that the implementation details are hidden, but conveyed in a way that is human-readable. You do not hide the machine from the man, but translate between them in a way that makes neither of them invisible.
This is where skeuomorphism used to be king before computers ate the world. In the 90s everybody knew how a paper book worked, so document readers presented as books. Everyone knew how a tape deck worked, so audio apps presented as tape decks. Floppy disk as save icon, etc
Unfortunately, the passage of time is inexorable, and by the late 2000s we had a lot of users who had never actually seen a tape deck/floppy disk. And the whole skeuomorphic project came crashing down.